Become a Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA)


Link to March 2006 Questions

There has been a tremendous response to CSQA blog - meant for the aspirants of CSQA certification. This has been set up to make sure every CSQA aspirant finds all the necessary material at one place.

I have given few details of CSQA below. For those who want to goto the contents directly, use this link - CONTENTS. Those who would like to goto the Questions section can directly go there using this link - Q&A. I am also updating the CSQA FAQs with all of the queries I got from many people. Please go through this FAQ page before raising any query.

For all of the CSQA aspirants, apart from this Introduction page, I also suggest you to go through the following pages before moving on to the CBOK-2006 material page:

CSQA - An Overview

Certified Software Quality Analyst (CSQA) is a widely recognized certification in the software industry now. As a CSQA certified professional, the QA executives will be able to put the QA prinicples into practice in the right manner at the right time and hence will be able to play a huge role in building the organisations. Getting certified always helps in three ways:

  • Indication of a level of knowledge and competence
  • Certification can be a deciding factor in hiring, promotion, and salary action decisions
  • Recertification requirements are a spur to continuing education
CSQA - Statistics

The number of active CSQA certified professionals according to the CSQA Active Roster is 7396 as of 24th January, 2006. The earliest person who was CSQA certified and is still active according to the Active Roster is William Perry. This Roster is available at this link: http://www.softwarecertifications.org/static/RosterCSQA.pdf

Exam format

The four and a half-hour exam is made up of four parts; two parts multiple-choice and two parts
essay and short answer. You will have forty-fi ve minutes to complete each of the multiplechoice
sections and one hour and fi fteen minutes to complete each of the essay and short answer sections. There is a ten-minute break between each part.

Application, Recertification & Others

Just to brief you, inorder to be able to sit for the examination, we have to satisfy the pre - requisites, Code of Ethics, Submit a Character Reference along with the application. This information is available in the SoftwareCertifications website in the page - "Applying for CSQA/CSTE"
You can view the complete CBOK contents at this link:
http://www.softwarecertifications.org/csqabok/csqabok.htm

CSQA certified candidates must be recertified 3 years after passing CSQA to stay current in the field. This can be demonstrated by 1) submitting a Recertification Journal of qualified Continuing Professional Education activities, or 2) by taking an Examination for Recertification to demonstrate the maintenance of the certification.

There are individual seven categories eligible for Continuing Professional Education (CPE) reporting which are given at this link:
http://www.softwarecertifications.org/qai_recertification.htm

There are Advanced Levels of Certifications too - Do check them out @ SoftwareCertifications

  1. CSTE/CSQA ->
  2. ASTP/ASQP ->
  3. MSQA/MSTE

More info is available at: http://www.softwarecertifications.org/qai_levels.htm

For further details on the Schedule of the exam, Application procedures, Recertification, Obtaining & Using Credentials etc can go to www.softwarecertifications.org/qai_cqa.htm

PS: Though the old version is still available, there may be problem with few links as changes were made directly to the pages which are useful for the new CBOK. You can refer the CBOK-2006 Contents page for those Knowledge Categories.

posted by Prasanna Kumar at 11:19 AM | 37 comments